COVID-19: A plague of the mind

Anthony Matury, Staff Writer

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, 2020 has been anything but good for everyone. It all started because of Coronavirus. It has been a problem ever since December of 2019. We’ve taken many precautions to prevent the spread of it, some more logical than others. No matter what though, I think we, as a globally collective whole, let the coronavirus overstay its welcome. 

Covid-19 was a placebo thing at first. We thought it was such a huge problem, even though it wasn’t. Then it became a huge problem. Not only that, but people cracked under pressure and started to do irrational and unethical things. One prominent example of irrationality is when people decided to hoard toilet paper. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon, leaving the rest of us with nothing. 

What did it do? Absolutely nothing, other than leaving the majority of us with no way to clean ourselves. Another is shutting down entire states by putting them into quarantine. In other words, bludgeoning the capitalist economy we lived with for more than two centuries over the head like Glenn from The Walking Dead. One infamous example of being unethical is when New York governor Andrew Cuomo, according to The New York Times, decided to put coronavirus patients into nursing homes, not considering the fact that the main group of people dying are old and immunocompromised people. 

School in general took a massive toll because of the virus. Not only do they have to enforce new health policies, they also have to worry about contact tracing. It sounds like a good idea, but is it really? Is it as good as people claim to be when the people who get contact traced, most of the time, if not all, get tested negative for Covid-19? I don’t think so. 

Another thing that happened is schools shut down in March of this year. Not to say it’s bad, but I think the cons outweigh the pros by a lot. Does it prevent the spread? To some degree, yes. Was it the best thing to do? Absolutely not. 

For some unknown reason, everyone who decided on shutting down school thought that no one was going to have a problem shifting from in-person school to remote learning, and not only that, they also expected efficiency. Consequentially, a lot of people’s grades, myself included, tanked because of it. 

One of the biggest problems I have is with the mask mandate. Why? It hasn’t done anything to prevent the spread of it. I’d say it’s just as bad as the toilet paper scandal, if not worse. It gave people a false sense of safety. It made those people think that wearing a mask is a perfect substitute for social distancing, when a lot of people have been saying to wear masks AND social distance themselves. 

But they don’t listen. Why? I’d imagine it’s a Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that people who have no knowledge or ability in a certain field or subject think they are aficionados, that has spread like Mad Cow’s Disease. 

“Experts”, like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, who has NO experience in the medical field, who thought simply shaming people would stop climate change, even though she’s done things that are substantially worse, suddenly emerge from the shadows to give their two worthless cents and disappear once more. The worst part of it is, people listen. They get brainwashed by it, and they suddenly become “experts” as well. 

So, if there’s one thing I am 99 percent sure of, society in the United States is doomed to fall. Not because of people overreacting to a virus, not because of the economy falling on its face, not because of riots from the election and/or BLM — none of those things. It’s because of people’s sheer ignorance and incompetence alone.